Creating screencast with audio on Linux
By screencast I don’t mean slideshow, but real-time recording of
screen. I used the following software:
- recordmydesktop
- mencoder
Recordmydesktop is great program, it only has one subtle bug: it does
not allow X or Y coordinate to be zero, so I had to move all the
windows 1 pixel to the right. No big deal. I recorded on a 1024x768
area using 1680x1050 screen, so there was plenty of space off-camera
that I could use the stage content and record everything in a single
go.
I used mencoder to convert the video from Ogg/Theora to other formats.
Although I prefer Ogg, many hardware DVD players do not support it (in
fact, it’s hard to find one that does).
I had problems with sound setup, although everything was at max in
KMix, it was not loud enough. I have same problems using Skype, so
this is some problem with my computer, not the software. Luckily,
mencoder can also manipulate volume, so I increased it during
conversion. I used a line like this one to invoke mencoder:
mencoder -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o video.avi -lameopts abr:br=128:vol=9 -mc 0 video.ogv
At first I used -oac lavc, but audio and video were out of sync, so I
switched to lame.